It’s the hot accent.
“What’s a bit much?” Carol asks. She looks like she needs a McCormick tartan handkerchief to mop up her drool as she looks at Hamish.
“The tartan.” The word tartan rolls off his tongue like it’s a cocker spaniel being sprung from a cage. “By the time the wedding comes, we’ll look like Nessie ingested a bunch of highlanders and vomited everywhere.”
Carol laughs like that’s the funniest joke she’s ever heard.
“Hamish!” Marie exclaims, walking over and offering herself up to him for a hug like he’s a rock climbing wall and there’s a prize for reaching the top. “So good to meet you!” Her eyes are bright and excited as he pulls away from the embrace and she asks, “You’re a sports star in Europe, I hear. What position do you play? Shortstop?”
Hamish’s golden eyebrows turn down. “I play football, Marie.” Jason stifles a laugh.
“Oh. Tight end, then?” She cranes her neck around behind him to check out his tight end.
“No—not American football. I play soccer.” His voice is filled with a frustrated resignation, as if he’s had this same conversation far too often for his liking.
“Point guard?” she tries.
Jason hands the poor Scot another shot and claps him on the back. “Just give up, man.”
“Americans,” Hamish mutters before downing the drink.
Where in the hell is Andrew?
I shouldn’t care. I know I shouldn’t care. I blew it. But he could have told me. We’re grown-ups. We each have the ability to exchange emotional truths in an honest way.
Barring that, would it kill the man to send a basic text?
While Amy sulks and Marie and Carol moon over Hamish, I try to find Shannon. She’s disappeared. I grab two glasses of wine from an increasingly-attractive male waiter who walks by with a tray of poured Pinot Grigio. I work on drinking part of my second? third? glass of wine.
After searching everywhere, I finally find her in the bedroom, in a walk-in closet, trying not to cry.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. She’s holding a tartan garter in her hands and just standing there, staring at Declan’s shoehorn, which hangs from a hook behind his suits.
“I’m not sure I can do this.”
There is a point in every maid of honor’s stretch of time in this role where we expect the bride to get cold feet. If you’re a woman in modern America, you’ve been steeped in the wedding articles since you were about nine or so, and could read the Cosmopolitan and Glamour magazines your mom left all over the house. You know Ten Ways To Make Her Wedding Rock and Five Mistakes Bridesmaids Make and Why Good Friends Throw Naughty Bachelorette Parties.
Cold feet are just a part of the wedding process.
“You love Declan. Being Mrs. McCormick is going to be awesome,” I assure her. I offer her the untouched wine goblet.
She looks at me like I just ate a Madagascar hissing cockroach in front of her. “I know that! I’m not talking about the wedding. I’m talking about this stupid dinner party!” She ignores the wine I’m offering.
That’s how I really know she’s upset.
“Oh.”
“And where’s Andrew?” she snaps.
I finish my third glass (definitely third) and start in on her reject.
“No clue,” I say.
Bzzz.
I pull my phone out of my pocket and gently guide Shannon back into the living room. She pivots at the doorway and tosses the garter onto her bed.
I haven’t seen Andrew since the night he stole Mr. Wiffles and we fought nearly a month ago. He texted a half-hearted apology and I texted back a lame half-acceptance. After that, his assistant has asked me a few wedding-related questions regarding schedules. No other contact.
And Declan won’t reveal what Andrew told him that night they worked out. He’s been in New York on business, then in Paris, and finally he’s back—for this party. Andrew and Declan made it clear that he has to leave early and board the helicopter to go back to New York again.
I look at my phone and bark out a weird laugh.
“Is that him?” Shannon asks.
“Oh, my God!” I hold up my phone so she can read this.
She gives me a knowing look. “I know he’s traveling so much these days, and he’s only in town for a few hours, but you guys have to talk this out—”
Chug. Hmm. That fourth glass went down well.
“Does that text say what I think it says?” Shannon looks gut-punched. “Did he seriously just text you with, Only here for the party. Not even time for a quickie.”
“Yep.”
Andrew walks in the living room at that precise moment. The force of our glares should have propelled him right through the wall, but instead he lurches slightly to the right, one hand in his pocket, the other on the wood counter near the kitchen.
He gives me a wave.
“A wave?” she hisses. “You get a wave? That’s it?”
“Yep. A fight, a month of mostly silence, a bizarre text and a wave.”
We contemplate that one by stewing in the silence of the outraged. It has a very bitter taste.
“What man doesn’t make time for a quickie?” she huffs.
“A gay man?”
Her eyes go wide. “He’s gay?”
That question makes me remember the last time we made love. “No. Definitely not gay. Just sayin’. There are two kinds of men who aren’t interested in quickies: gay men and dead men.”
Her eyes narrow.
“Gay men like quickies.”